This is a wonderful, beautiful epic of a novel. Set in Afghanistan and the United States between the 1970s to the present day, it is a heartbreaking tale of a young boy, Amir, and his best friend who are torn apart. This is a classic word-of-mouth novel and is sure to become as universally loved as The God of Small Things and The Glass Palace.

Twelve year old Amir is desperate to win the approval of his father Baba, one of the richest and most respected merchants in Kabul. He has failed to do so through academia or brawn, but the one area where they connect is the annual kite fighting tournament. Amir is determined not just to win the competition but to run the last kite and bring it home triumphantly, to prove to his father that he has the makings of a man. His loyal friend Hassan is the best kite runner that Amir has ever seen, and he promises to help him - for Hassan always helps Amir out of trouble. But Hassan is a Shi'a Muslim and this is 1970s Afghanistan. Hassan is taunted and jeered at by Amir's school friends; he is merely a servant living in a shack at the back of Amir's house. So why does Amir feel such envy towards his friend? Then, what happens to Hassan on the afternoon of the tournament is to shatter all their lives, and define their futures.

Amazon.co.uk Review

The Kite Runner of Khaled Hosseini's deeply moving fiction debut is an illiterate Afghan boy with an uncanny instinct for predicting exactly where a downed kite will land. Growing up in the city of Kabul in the early 1970s, Hassan was narrator Amir's closest friend even though the loyal 11-year-old with "a face like a Chinese doll" was the son of Amir's father's servant and a member of Afghanistan's despised Hazara minority. But in 1975, on the day of Kabul's annual kite-fighting tournament, something unspeakable happened between the two boys.

Narrated by Amir, a 40-year-old novelist living in California, The Kite Runner tells the gripping story of a boyhood friendship destroyed by jealousy, fear, and the kind of ruthless evil that transcends mere politics. Running parallel to this personal narrative of loss and redemption is the story of modern Afghanistan and of Amir's equally guilt-ridden relationship with the war-torn city of his birth. The first Afghan novel to be written in English, The Kite Runner begins in the final days of King Zahir Shah's 40-year reign and traces the country's fall from a secluded oasis to a tank-strewn battlefield controlled by the Russians and then the trigger-happy Taliban. When Amir returns to Kabul to rescue Hassan's orphaned child, the personal and the political get tangled together in a plot that is as suspenseful as it is taut with feeling.

The son of an Afghan diplomat whose family received political asylum in the United States in 1980, Hosseini combines the unflinching realism of a war correspondent with the satisfying emotional pull of master storytellers such as Rohinton Mistry. Like the kite that is its central image, the story line of this mesmerizing first novel occasionally dips and seems almost to dive to the ground. But Hosseini ultimately keeps everything airborne until his heartrending conclusion in an American picnic park.

This is a book that touched me deeply. It's not the tragic history of Afghanistan or the unbearable suffering of its people that touched me the most, but rather the personal struggle of Amir toward his redemption. The moment he ran after the green kite af

Rahim Khan had wanted me to stay with him a few more days, to plan more thoroughly. But I knew I had to leave as soon as possible. I was afraid I'd change my mind. I was afraid I'd deliberate, ruminate, agonize, rationalize, and talk myself into not going. I was afraid the appeal of my life in America would draw me back, that I would wade back into that great, big river and let myself forget, let ...(1回应)

2012-08-21 09:591人喜欢

Rahim Khan had wanted me to stay with him a few more days, to plan more thoroughly. But I knew I had to leave as soon as possible. I was afraid I'd change my mind. I was afraid I'd deliberate, ruminate, agonize, rationalize, and talk myself into not going. I was afraid the appeal of my life in America would draw me back, that I would wade back into that great, big river and let myself forget, let the things I had learned these last few days sink to the bottom. I was afraid that I'd let the waters carry me away from what I had to do.

The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
- Your Highlight at location 1562-1563 | Added on Saturday, 12 March 2016 18:15:53
Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don’t have to say anything—that’s how it is between people who are each other’s first memories, people who have fed from the same breast.
==========
The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
- Your H...

Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don’t have to say anything—that’s how it is between people who are each other’s first memories, people who have fed from the same breast.

“There are only three real men in this world, Amir,” he’d say. He’d count them off on his fingers: America the brash savior, Britain, and Israel. “The rest of them—” he used to wave his hand and make a phht sound “—they’re like gossiping old women.”

I wanted to say more, tell him how touched I was by his act of kindness, how much I appreciated all that he had done for me, all that he was still doing. But I knew I’d embarrass him. “Tashakor,” I repeated instead.

My cheeks burned and guilt coursed through me, the guilt of indulging myself at the expense of his ulcer, his black fingernails and aching wrists. But I would stand my ground, I decided. I didn’t want to sacrifice for Baba anymore.

I envied her. Her secret was out. Spoken. Dealt with. I opened my mouth and almost told her how I’d betrayed Hassan, lied, driven him out, and destroyed a forty-year relationship between Baba and Ali. But I didn’t. I suspected there were many ways in which Soraya Taheri was a better person than me. Courage was just one of them.

“Their sons go out to nightclubs looking for meat and get their girlfriends pregnant, they have kids out of wedlock and no one says a goddamn thing. Oh, they’re just men having fun! I make one mistake and suddenly everyone is talking nang and namoos, and I have to have my face rubbed in it for the rest of my life.”

And I thought of Hassan. Some day, Inshallah, you will be a great writer, he had said once, and people all over the world will read your stories. There was so much goodness in my life. So much happiness. I wondered whether I deserved any of it.

“I want Father and Mother jan. I want Sasa. I want to play with Rahim Khan sahib in the garden. I want to live in our house again.” He dragged his forearm across his eyes. “I want my old life back.”I didn’t know what to say, where to look, so I gazed down at my hands. Your old life, I thought. My old life too. I played in the same yard, Sohrab. I lived in the same house. But the grass is dead...

2015-08-14 11:10

“I want Father and Mother jan. I want Sasa. I want to play with Rahim Khan sahib in the garden. I want to live in our house again.” He dragged his forearm across his eyes. “I want my old life back.”I didn’t know what to say, where to look, so I gazed down at my hands. Your old life, I thought. My old life too. I played in the same yard, Sohrab. I lived in the same house. But the grass is dead and a stranger’s jeep is parked in the driveway of our house, pissing oil all over the asphalt. Our old life is gone, Sohrab, and everyone in it is either dead or dying. It’s just you and me now. Just you and me.

I became what I am today at the age of twelve...第一句话就紧紧抓住了我。描述他老爸的时候说hands that look capable of uprooting a willow tree, and a black glare that would "drop the devil to his knees begging for mercy"实在太生动了。

2012-08-05 09:26

I became what I am today at the age of twelve...

第一句话就紧紧抓住了我。描述他老爸的时候说

hands that look capable of uprooting a willow tree, and a black glare that would "drop the devil to his knees begging for mercy"

For you, a thousand times over
“If you asked, I would,” he finally said, looking right at me. I dropped my eyes. To this day, I find it hard to gaze directly at people like Hassan, people who mean every word they say.
“But I wonder,” he added. “Would you ever ask me to do such a thing, Amir agha?”
I squinted in the dimming light and spotted Hassan walking slowly toward me. I met him ...

2013-05-13 08:10

For you, a thousand times over

“If you asked, I would,” he finally said, looking right at me. I dropped my eyes. To this day, I find it hard to gaze directly at people like Hassan, people who mean every word they say.
“But I wonder,” he added. “Would you ever ask me to do such a thing, Amir agha?”

I squinted in the dimming light and spotted Hassan walking slowly toward me. I met him by a leafless birch tree on the edge of the ravine.
He had the blue kite in his hands; that was the first thing I saw. And I can’t lie now and say my eyes didn’t scan it for any rips. His chapan had mud smudges down the front and his shirt was ripped just below the collar. He stopped. Swayed on his feet like he was going to collapse. Then he steadied himself. Handed me the kite.
“Where were you? I looked for you,” I said. Speaking those words was like chewing on a rock.
Hassan dragged a sleeve across his face, wiped snot and tears. I waited for him to say
something, but we just stood there in silence, in the fading light.

There was a monster in the lake. It had grabbed Hassan by the ankles, dragged him to the murky bottom. I was that monster.

Hassan had so many questions about you. Had you married? Did you have children? How tall were you? Did you still fly kites and go to the
cinema? Were you happy? He said he had befriended an old Farsi teacher in Bamiyan who had taught him to read and write. If he wrote you a letter, would I pass it on to you? And did I
think you would write back? I told him what I knew of you from the few phone conversations I had had with your father, but mostly I did not know how to answer him. Then he asked me about your father. When I told him, Hassan buried his face in his hands and broke into tears. He wept like a child for the rest of that night.

“What will Amir agha think?” he said to me. “What will he think when he comes back to Kabul after the war and finds that I have assumed his place in the house?”

I fell asleep at some point, and, when I woke up, daylight had dimmed a bit, the shadows had stretched, and Sohrab was still sitting next to me. He was still looking down at his hands.

“Do you want me to run that kite for you?”
His Adam’s apple rose and fell as he swallowed. The wind lifted his hair. I thought I saw him nod.
“For you, a thousand times over,” I heard myself say.
Then I turned and ran.

I read 19 pages tonight, and stopped at chapter six. reading speed 185/per minute. quite normal. not great. maybe it's because the preceding part of the fiction requires a low speed to get familiar with those words and the plot.
At about the end of this week, I will already have owned my kindle touch, which i think will make my reading much easier, and comforting.

2011-12-05 20:38

I read 19 pages tonight, and stopped at chapter six. reading speed 185/per minute. quite normal. not great. maybe it's because the preceding part of the fiction requires a low speed to get familiar with those words and the plot.

At about the end of this week, I will already have owned my kindle touch, which i think will make my reading much easier, and comforting.

The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
- Your Highlight at location 1562-1563 | Added on Saturday, 12 March 2016 18:15:53
Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don’t have to say anything—that’s how it is between people who are each other’s first memories, people who have fed from the same breast.
==========
The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
- Your H...

Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don’t have to say anything—that’s how it is between people who are each other’s first memories, people who have fed from the same breast.

“There are only three real men in this world, Amir,” he’d say. He’d count them off on his fingers: America the brash savior, Britain, and Israel. “The rest of them—” he used to wave his hand and make a phht sound “—they’re like gossiping old women.”

I wanted to say more, tell him how touched I was by his act of kindness, how much I appreciated all that he had done for me, all that he was still doing. But I knew I’d embarrass him. “Tashakor,” I repeated instead.

My cheeks burned and guilt coursed through me, the guilt of indulging myself at the expense of his ulcer, his black fingernails and aching wrists. But I would stand my ground, I decided. I didn’t want to sacrifice for Baba anymore.

I envied her. Her secret was out. Spoken. Dealt with. I opened my mouth and almost told her how I’d betrayed Hassan, lied, driven him out, and destroyed a forty-year relationship between Baba and Ali. But I didn’t. I suspected there were many ways in which Soraya Taheri was a better person than me. Courage was just one of them.

“Their sons go out to nightclubs looking for meat and get their girlfriends pregnant, they have kids out of wedlock and no one says a goddamn thing. Oh, they’re just men having fun! I make one mistake and suddenly everyone is talking nang and namoos, and I have to have my face rubbed in it for the rest of my life.”

And I thought of Hassan. Some day, Inshallah, you will be a great writer, he had said once, and people all over the world will read your stories. There was so much goodness in my life. So much happiness. I wondered whether I deserved any of it.

“I want Father and Mother jan. I want Sasa. I want to play with Rahim Khan sahib in the garden. I want to live in our house again.” He dragged his forearm across his eyes. “I want my old life back.”I didn’t know what to say, where to look, so I gazed down at my hands. Your old life, I thought. My old life too. I played in the same yard, Sohrab. I lived in the same house. But the grass is dead...

2015-08-14 11:10

“I want Father and Mother jan. I want Sasa. I want to play with Rahim Khan sahib in the garden. I want to live in our house again.” He dragged his forearm across his eyes. “I want my old life back.”I didn’t know what to say, where to look, so I gazed down at my hands. Your old life, I thought. My old life too. I played in the same yard, Sohrab. I lived in the same house. But the grass is dead and a stranger’s jeep is parked in the driveway of our house, pissing oil all over the asphalt. Our old life is gone, Sohrab, and everyone in it is either dead or dying. It’s just you and me now. Just you and me.

Are you satisfied now? he’d hissed. Do you feel better? I hadn’t been happy and I hadn’t felt better, not at all. But I did now. My body was broken--just how badly I wouldn’t find out until later--but I felt healed.Healed at last. I laughed.

2015-07-27 19:01

Are you satisfied now? he’d hissed. Do you feel better? I hadn’t been happy and I hadn’t felt better, not at all. But I did now. My body was broken--just how badly I wouldn’t find out until later--but I felt healed.Healed at last. I laughed.